Share your wisdom

[Krystof01]

OK here goes:

-Demos complete, moving onto the 'real recordings', professional standard needed; to be professionally mastered at the end.
-Recording onto my KORG D16 so need to bypass the horrible preamps.
-Have decided initially to buy a Soundcraft M12 for it's 'ghost' preamps and nice EQ (was thinking about the A&H mixwizard 16:2 but there not widely available over here, a little more and I don't really need to be paying for the extra effects as not that good quality).
-Record through mixer into D16, mainly out of digital outs of the M12.

Problems:
-When it comes to mixing the only outs I have on the D16 is one 1/4" aux out and a spdif out (but then I'd have to buy a convertor for about £300 so don't want to go down that route). So to use the M12 as a mixer I'll only be able to mix each track individaully and send it back into the KORG which is kinda annoying.
-The next problem is that the audio signal out of the aux out carries a subtle noise from the hard drive of the D16 (little audible sound in synch with hard drive ticking over).

So really the question is do you think it's feasable to mix each track individaully without having all the other tracks on the mixing board at the same time?

Would you buy the mixing desk at all? My reasoning is that I need some preamps one wau or the other and buying a standalone unit like the Mindprint envoice or VC-Q1 (which is only one channel) comes to nearly the price of the board. Also I want to use an external EQ as the KORG D16;s isn't that good. It has been well documented that outboard EQ's are either cheap and nasty or expensive for anywhere near decent quality.

The only other alternative would be to record and apply the EQ and effects in 'real time' straight into the D16 and not to come back to the mixer. EQ'ing on recording doesn't really work, or does it?

Any thoughts?

Krystof.